News

WNCG students Akash Doshi and Manan Gupta have been named winners in the 2021 Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (QIF) North America Program. Doshi and Gupta proposed the project “Federated Generative Learning for Channel Estimation in mmWave and THz systems.” The pair was one of 16 winners chosen from 43 teams of finalists. “We are extremely honored to have been selected as the recipients of this prestigious fellowship,” Gupta said. “We look forward to working with Qualcomm to develop impactful and innovative wireless technology.”

WNCG's Prof. Jeff Andrews has been named as a recipient of a 2021 Qualcomm Faculty Award. The Qualcomm Faculty Award (QFA) "supports key professors and their research through a $75,000 charitable donation to their university. The goal of the QFA funding is to strengthen Qualcomm’s engagement with faculty who are playing a key role in our recruiting of top graduate students."

A team of Texas ECE students has been named a winner of the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship 2020 (North America) competition. The team of Khurram Mazher and Andrew Graff won for their project "Radar-to-radar Interference: System Level Analysis and Solutions." Khurram and Andrew were one of 13 winning teams selected from 42 finalists. The Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship began in 2009, and "has continued to grow with the addition of more universities, more candidates, and expansion to our research centers internationally."

Every Spring, Texas ECE’s Awards Banquet celebrates the achievements of the department’s outstanding students and faculty. Three WNCG members were among those honored at this year’s event, which was held last week on May 6. WNCG Student Ahmed Kord won the prestigious Graduate Student Excellence Award for 2018-2019. The department confers this prize annually on one graduate student who has demonstrated “high academic achievement in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.”

WNCG faculty member Constantine Caramanis was one of five associate professors in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department (ECE) promoted to full professor this spring. Caramanis joined UT ECE and WNCG in the fall of 2006; he is currently the WNCG’s assistant director. His research interests include: Decision-making under uncertainty, Statistical learning and data driven decision-making, Large scale networks and computation, and Adaptive Control and Optimization.

Prof. Sanjay Shakkottai received a 2017 Qualcomm Faculty Award. The award supports key professors and their research at leading universities across the country. This program connects Qualcomm with top academic researchers in hardware, software, and systems to help track the latest discoveries and facilitate new collaborations between industry and academia.

WNCG student Ahmed Kord received a 2016 Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship for his project entitled, “Fully-Integrated Reconfigurable Magnet-less Non-reciprocal Components for Next-Generation Wireless Communication Systems.” The project was completed in collaboration with Negar Reiskarimian at Columbia University.

In recognition of his outstanding performance as a summer intern, Qualcomm awarded WNCG Ph.D. student Tianyang Bai the Roberto Padovani Fellowship.  The fellowship was created in 2008 to recognize Qualcomm’s corporate research and development interns who demonstrate superior technical performance during their summer internship. Roberto Padovani was Qualcomm’s chief technology officer for nearly 10 years and was a leading innovator for the company.

In recognition of her outstanding performance as a summer intern, Qualcomm awarded WNCG Ph.D. student Debarati Kundu the Roberto Padovani Fellowship.  The fellowship was created in 2008 to recognize Qualcomm’s corporate research and development interns who demonstrate superior technical performance during their summer internship. Roberto Padovani was Qualcomm’s chief technology officer for nearly 10 years and was a leading innovator for the company.

The Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) recently awarded four UT Austin faculty $1 million for a study regarding effects and reparation efforts following WMD attacks on interdependent networks.